We welcome you to visit the forums to get an idea about the projects we do in our spare time, and apply to join our discussions if you like to build machinery. Note, there are many rapid changes occurring, and we currently only plan on an annual OS release to support as much of the open-source software out there that we can verify works. The OS hopes to reconcile scattered projects into a clearly documented guide for people interested in robotics, machining, 3D printers, and manufacturing equipment.

Why is Joel ( VE7NTP ) constantly answering emails about what this project is about?

Volunteered to be the one available to provide a chain of maintainer accountability

The commercial SSL certificate and paypal invoice history provided a clear financial trail for users concerned about site file origins

A public GPG key should match signed file sig key files on other sites along with the contact email

Had to endure various scams being a public contact, and some weirdos have actually shown up at his home uninvited

Users can also list modified package files in the OS (note the system keys are identical to Raspbian):sudo debsums -sac

Out of repo builds unable to be packaged properly are usually placed in /opt and /usr/local. The sources / kernel patches we used are clearly documented, and should generate the identical binaries if re-built with the same flags

As the OS is meant to run equipment for many days at a time... we have disabled several default system services that auto-update, download/report in the background, or auto start. This is part of living with systemd, generates various apt warnings, and helps prevent interfering with RT kernel tasks.

The OS was originally meant to be a temporary project setup where apt would progressively purge the old patches, but a year and half later the main repo is still missing/broken several critical apps we use for our own projects.... so it just kinda became a "lite fork" that eats up way too many weekends

We agree it is better to have signed audit-able binaries with debsums signatures, but that would be a massive packaging undertaking that would duplicate Debian groups work. =)